Scientific American Supplement, No. 648, June 2, 1888.

NEW YORK, JUNE 2, 1888
Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXV., No. 648. Scientific American, established 1845.
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For a quarter of a century maritime nations have been continuously engaged in improving the mechanical appliances of their large ports. The use of tracks to bring goods to be placed on vessels as near as possible to the shipping point, the substitution of oblique moles for perpendicular ones in large docks, the creation of a hydraulic method of loading and unloading through movable cranes (which will perhaps in a near future cede to an electrical one), constitute the means most used for expediting transshipments and reducing the expense of them to a minimum. But, at the same time that the facilities for all kinds for handling packages have been increased, it has also become necessary to greatly increase the power of the machines applied to them. The construction of large packets now requires the putting in place of boilers of great weight, and the adoption of the huge pieces that compose the artillery of ironclads necessitates the use of force that has been unknown up to recent times.
Fig. 1.—DIAGRAM OF SHEARS.
Fig. 2.—ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TON SHEARS OF THE PORT OF MARSEILLES.
At present, then, we could no longer be content with manual power, acting upon windlasses or capstans, for lifting and shifting. It has become necessary to apply steam or hydraulic motors to these operations. Of these, the latter are the most used, on account of their easy operation and their submitting to the greatest stresses with a very satisfactory proportionality of the expenditure of motive power. One of the most remarkable of such apparatus is the one that the Compagnie de Fives-Lille has recently set up on one of the moles of the national dock at Marseilles, for the service of the chamber of commerce, and this merits a description so much the more in that it is an important improvement upon the analogous apparatus now in use in other ports.